The present invention relates to a running guide apparatus for a vehicle capable of keeping a safety at passing through a narrow path, and of decreasing a burden of a driver when the vehicle is passing through the narrow path.
A vehicle such as an automobile conventionally has a sensor in which a touch switch is turned on when a corner pole or bar-shaped member touches an obstacle such as a wall, guardrail, pole and parked vehicle, as disclosed in an official gazette of Japanese Utility Model Laid-open No. 5-68742 (1993), in order to compensate a sense of a driver, thereby recognizing a gap between the vehicle and obstacles existing in right and left side of the vehicle.
Recently, a technology is developed for decreasing the burden of the driver when the vehicle passes through the narrow path in the manner that an ultrasonic sensor arranged on a side surface or four corners of the vehicle irradiates an ultrasonic wave, receives a reflected wave from the obstacle, and measures a distance of the gap, thereby informing the driver of the measured distance.
However, since the driver needs a lot of skill to operate the vehicle with the above-mentioned corner pole attached on an outside of the body of the vehicle as a sign, it is impossible to obtain an effect to decrease the burden of the driver. In a contact type such as a feeler sensor, the driver can not operate a steering wheel sufficiently after touching the obstacle because he can not recognize the position before touching the object.
Furthermore, a supersonic technology can not teach the driver a positional relationship of the obstacle because of a deterioration of a spatial resolving power, and has an object dependence in which a radiated ultrasonic does not return from clothes of walkers and slippery walls. Accordingly, it is quite difficult to correspond to various structures existing on a road.